Coal Jobs Return To Wyoming

A haul truck takes coal from a pit in the Eagle Butte Coal Mine, north of Gillette, Wyo. It is one of 13 producing coal mines in the Powder River Basin.

Credit Madelyn Beck/Inside Energy

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The Gillette Workforce Center had a front row seat for the town’s coal woes.

The office has cream-colored walls, decorated with motivational posters and pictures of coal mines. Vermona Petersen is the manager of the center, which helps people find a new job.

“At the height of the layoffs last year, we were seeing between 250 and 300 people a day,” she said.

Wyoming coal mines laid off more than 450 workers last March amid financial troubles exacerbated by low natural gas prices and debt.

Coal prices have risen since then and major coal companies Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources have come out of bankruptcy. Nearly 300 of the coal mining jobs are also back in the Powder River Basin, according to the Mining Safety and Health Administration.

Petersen said the number of people passing through her office is down to about a third of the level when layoffs were so rampant last year, as more employers in and outside the mines are looking to hire. Job seekers aren’t just from coal, she added, but also from oil and gas; another industry struggling amid low prices the last few years.

“When the oil and gas industry started their layoffs, it was before the coal but that’s had a huge impact on our community as well,” she said.

Homecoming

Kevin Sisel was laid off from the oil and gas industry last April.

He said there weren’t any jobs in the area and he had to leave to find work in Indiana. For five months, he worked out-of-state while his family was back in Gillette. He said he only saw them about two weeks during that time.

“It made it real difficult missing sporting events, dance, whatever the kids were involved with,” he said. “I missed the lot of it.”

His wife Kayla and their two children, aged 8 and 9, did not move with Kevin. The kids were in school, Kayla had a job, and they couldn’t sell their house in a glutted housing market.

“It was rough,” Kayla said. “I mean, having to stay here with the kids, just them and I. There was a lot of tears. It was hard. ”

About 330 people left Gillette between July 2015 and July 2016, or about 1 percent of the population, according to U.S Census Bureau estimates.

Kevin said he knows people who are still trying to pay off a house there even after moving elsewhere for work. He gambled with the job market and moved home, eventually getting a job at Peabody Energy’s Caballo coal mine. But that mine only hired 11 more people between the slump last spring to this last winter.

Geno Palazzari, spokesman for the city of Gillette, said mines’ peak employment rates probably aren’t coming back, but people may still stick around, helping the community move forward.

“Now that people have been here and have kids and grandkids here, they don’t want to go,” he said. “If they’ve left, they’ve come back. And so we have maybe a little bit more of a mobile workforce than they’ve had in the past.”

Wyoming’s perennial problem with attracting new industries to the state — and evening out the boom and bust cycle — is its low population. Palazzari said having more available workers may help.

Gillette is working with two other cities to form a “new growth alliance” to market their area to new businesses, Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King said. She’s also bullish on the new research projects in the city to study how to clean up coal and keep it out of the air.

“We have been known as the energy capital of the nation,” she said. “I believe with all this technology and research coming in, we’re going to be the energy research capital of the nation.”

Many in coal country are praising Trump for his regulatory roll-back, but the administration’s proposed budget would slash funding for energy research like clean coal, as well funding for other city projects.

Still, the mayor, like many others in Gillette, saw the Trump victory as a win for coal and she hopes other infrastructure projects and a steady coal industry will allow the local economy to even out.

“If we can even just get to stable, rather than the ups and down; just one straight line, even if it isn’t up there,” she said. “I think that’s just what people would like is just stability. And I do think we will get there.”

On the afternoon of April 17th, 10-year-old Gillian Chapman and her little sister Kailey were on their front porch. Gillian had on her roller blades; Kailey had her scooter. They had just gotten permission to go visit their friend Jaelynn, across the street and two doors down.

Then, Jaelynn’s house exploded.

“The house just split open,” Gillian said. “You could see the upstairs.”

Jaelynn Martinez was not in her home at the time, but her father Mark and uncle Joey Irwin were in the basement and were killed in the blast. Her mother, Erin Martinez was injured.

Coal country was celebrating this week when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke lifted a coal moratorium signed into law by the Obama Administration 14 months ago. But now the question is whether coal companies will even decide to expand their production in states like Wyoming. With the price of natural gas so low, coal has been having a hard time competing. But if and when companies do expand, their first stop is the Bureau of Land Management to submit an application. Right now BLM has 11 applications, but all but one was submitted over ten years ago.

Wyoming's congressional delegation is thrilled with the executive order President Trump signed to unwind President Obama’s climate change initiatives. But some in their party aren’t happy with the effort to roll back America’s role in combating global warming.

At a presentation at the University of Wyoming’s Energy Innovation Center, an energy economist argued that the coal industry will likely never recover to previous levels. That’s despite a small rebound in the first quarter of this year because of a cold winter.